


full circle

by seventhstar



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Cooking, Gen, Homesickness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 14:48:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15910437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhstar/pseuds/seventhstar
Summary: The first time Phichit tries to cook Thai food in Detroit, he is alone. Celestino, his new coach, is busy; his roommate and rinkmate, Yuuri Katsuki, is out of town at a competition and hasn’t yet returned. It’s just Phichit alone in his apartment, staring at the empty cupboards, trying to decide what to eat.Phichit’s not much of a chef, truth be told. He’s cooked very little. But the quality of the Thai restaurants in Detroit is suspect, and he is hungry; the English on every billboard and the bitter cold of Detroit wear on him like a millstone, and he is homesick. He can’t bring Bangkok’s sun or conjure up one of his five siblings to talk to him in his native tongue, but he can put together a meal that tastes right.Can’t he?





	full circle

The first time Phichit tries to cook Thai food in Detroit, he is alone. Celestino, his new coach, is busy; his roommate and rinkmate, Yuuri Katsuki, is out of town at a competition and hasn’t yet returned. It’s just Phichit alone in his apartment, staring at the empty cupboards, trying to decide what to eat.

Phichit’s not much of a chef, truth be told. He’s cooked very little. But the quality of the Thai restaurants in Detroit is suspect, and he is hungry; the English on every billboard and the bitter cold of Detroit wear on him like a millstone, and he is homesick. He can’t bring Bangkok’s sun or conjure up one of his five siblings to talk to him in his native tongue, but he can put together a meal that tastes right.

Can’t he?

The first challenge is actually finding a store. Most of the ingredients Phichit needs aren’t sold at the supermarket, so he does some strategic googling until he figures out Detroit has special grocery stores for Asian ingredients. Then there’s getting there: Phichit doesn’t drive or have a car. Phichit has no idea how public transport in Detroit works. Phichit really has no idea what he’s doing.

“Four miles can’t be that far,” he decides as he puts on his brand new snow boots. “It’ll be good exercise.”

Four miles is six and a half kilometers, because Americans are lunatics who refuse to use the metric system. That’s a distance that Phichit could normally walk without difficulty, but Detroit is a slushy, grey nightmare. The jet lag makes his eyelids heavy. The cold penetrates his jacket, and the snow penetrates his boots until his socks are wet, and halfway there his phone service abruptly stops.

Leaving him four kilometers from home with no idea where he’s going or how to get back. Leaving him cold and alone and with a headache from parsing so much English. Leaving him hungry for a hot tom yum gooang, the prawns cooked to perfection, the chilis fiery on his tongue.

He treks home after two hours of wandering and asking for directions. He’s managed to purchase some groceries, but he never found the store he was looking for, and ended up shopping in a Target instead. By the time he reaches his building, he’s shivering like mad.

A hot soup sounds like the perfect remedy, and so Phichit does his best.

He starts by boiling water, which is promising: it’s a universal ingredient. The shrimp he bought come in a can, and though he tries cleaning them, he ends up tossing them in the garbage after he gets a good whiff. He’s bought what he thinks is lemongrass but upon further inspection is something else entirely.

The fish sauce is atrocious, more oil than anything else. He’s got no kaffir lime leaves at all, only a sad sprig of cilantro. The end product looks all right—Phichit even pours out some into one of his nicest bowls, arranges it under the overhead light on the stove, and snaps a picture with steam still curling off the surface—but when he dips in a spoon for a taste, he revolts.

It tastes like spicy lime water.

It makes him more homesick than ever. He deletes the photo.

There’s a convenience store across the street, and stomach grumbling, he ducks in to grab something to eat. There are instant meals on a shelf by the door, ramen and udon and pad thai you can make with hot water and nothing else. He snags the pad thai in a moment of optimism.

Nothing has ever tasted less like pad thai. Even the peanut shavings on top taste like cardboard. Phichit chokes it all down, more for the heat than anything else, and then crawls into the shower and boils himself until he gets warm again.

Before he goes to sleep, he grabs a sticky note off of the nightstand, scribbles himself a reminder, and adds it to the line of notes already written stuck to the wall above the bed.

_Look at map before walking anywhere,_ he writes. _Carefully._

* * *

 

Nobody in America knows anything about Thailand.

When they do mention his homeland, it’s always either in the context of Thai food, which is popular among his new friends, or about some vague idea of Bangkok they have as a cesspool of human trafficking and prostitution. In a country with so much patriotism, Phichit feels compelled to defend his own.

Of Thai music, culture, language, the Americans Phichit meets are happy to learn, for they know nothing. But the food—Phichit feels possessive of the food of his homeland, because the pale imitations that pass for authentic in Detroit, the people around him are determined to defend.

So even though Phichit is a terrible cook, he continues trying, and documenting his attempts on Instagram (his food is beautiful, even if it tastes awful), and enduring the ribbing from his family and from Yuuri, who makes him katsudon after competitions, with good grace.

The best thing about having Yuuri as a roommate, besides having someone to make eye contact with every time a white person says something truly idiotic about Asia, is that Yuuri inevitably folds and goes along with whatever Phichit is doing. Are Phichit’s ideas occasionally terrible? Sure. Does Yuuri ever let him forget it when they are? Definitely not. But he joins in, which is all that matters.

(Back home, Phichit has four siblings to choose from if he wants company. Sometimes he longs for them, when people blink at him because he’s spoken too quickly and his accent has blurred the words, or when the greyness of Detroit depresses him. He doesn’t have any older brothers, but if he did, he thinks he’d be perfectly happy if they were Yuuri-like.)

“A cooking contest?”

“The rink is closed.” Phichit waves a hand at the window, where snow is blanketing the city rapidly. “The store is far away. We have no food.”

He looks, longingly, at the collection of post-it notes stuck to the fridge, listing all the things he and Yuuri were going to buy. Kaffir lime. Fish sauce. Udon noodles. They were going to walk to the store, because Phichit’s brain is now a veritable map of Detroit. They were going to make their favorite foods and eat them. Phichit was going to watch the uncut version of The King and The Skater 2. Thank god he buys the hamster food in bulk online.

“What we going to cook out of…” Yuuri squints at the kitchen, clearly trying to remember what’s left in their pantry. His glasses are lying out of reach and he’s too lazy to move. Every few minutes, he tries to grab them, misses, and frowns; Phichit is trying not to laugh at him. “Hot sauce, bread, and corn spaghetti?”

“That’s why it’s a competition, Yuuri. Unless you don’t think you can beat me.”

“You can’t even make scrambled eggs!”

“Just because I burned them that one time,” Phichit says, grinning as Yuuri sits up. Yup, he’s got him now. They’ll be competing in no time. “Come on. I’m hungry.”

“”Fine.” Yuuri inches up the couch until he can snatch his glasses off of the coffee table. “Let’s do it.”

As it turns out, the sum total of the ingredients in their kitchen are bread, milk, hot sauce, corn spaghetti, one onion, one box of frozen stuffed mushrooms, vinegar, assorted spices and condiments, and two eggs. He and Yuuri split them equally, cutting the onion in half and counting out half a loaf of bread each.

There’s no rice, no other fresh produce, no noodles that weren’t bought by two very tired skaters who forgot to read the labels on things.

Phichit tries to be ambitious—reducing the Tabasco and mixing in flour to imitate chili paste, sauteing the onions with vinegar, even chopped up the stuffed mushrooms and attempting to use them like raw ones.

Yuuri mixes eggs, ketchup, and noodles to make what he describes as pasta. Phichit has eaten Ciao Ciao’s authentic Italian cooking; he’s pretty sure what Yuuri has made does not qualify as pasta. He’s not even sure it qualifies as food. Yuuri’s dish looks like it could top a Buzzfeed article about the Top Ten Worst Things College Students Eat. Phichit’s dish is brightly colored, carefully arranged.

He takes pictures of them both and uploads them side by side. _Cooking lessons with @katsuki-yuuri,_ he captions it.

“I hate you.”

“I hate me,” Phichit agrees.

“Why can’t you just use a recipe?” Yuuri asks. He’s lying on the couch half in Phichit’s lap, slightly green. He will eat anything, like a dog, and most of their concoctions ended up his iron stomach.

“Because it’s boring. I don’t just to cook other people’s food. I want it to be unique. I want it to be mine.”

Yuuri considers this, or at least Phichit thinks he’s considering it, although he also looks like maybe he might throw up. Phichit debates rolling him onto the floor.

“Look, you learned how to skate by watching videos of other skaters, right?”

“Yeah?” So what? Phichit is a visual person.

“Maybe you should try out a recipe before you make up your own.”

* * *

 

One afternoon everything goes wrong.

Phichit’s biggest sponsor is hinting they might not renew his contract. His sister has the flu. Campus is covered with slush that inevitably gets into his shoes. His Instagram’s been hacked. His quad toe loop was a disaster, even though he’s been landing alright recently.

It’s a day when Phichit feels like his progress has stalled, and he has the urge to prove to himself that he can accomplish something today after all.

What he would do if he were at home is find a sibling and rope them into vlogging with him. But since that’s not possible here, and since Phichit doesn’t feel like calling any of the friends he’s made in the states, he gets the hamsters out of their cage instead.

They crawl happily onto him while he sits on the couch and edits a video from his earlier practice for social media. One of them buries under his shirt, and Phichit nearly falls off the couch; he’s ticklish. His stomach grumbles.

“Hmm,” Phichit says. He’s been focusing on skating-related tweets and posts lately, but maybe it’s time to mix it up. A variety of content keeps followers interested, and a strong social media presence will only bring more Thai children into skating and more sponsors into Phichit’s bank account.

“You know what we don’t have, Arthur?” Phichit asks. He scratches Arthur’s soft head. Arthur is the oldest of his hamsters, and the friendliest. “Cooking vlogs. You up for it?”

Phichit’s attempts at Thai food are improving, but he decides to take Yuuri’s advice and recreate something simple, just to hone his skills. A search of the kitchen produces all the necessary ingredients for a mac and cheese recipe he found online, and Phichit gives in and decides to add something extra to give it a personal twist. He stacks what cooking equipment the two of them have on the counter, sets up the tripod so that his phone is facing the kitchen, and touches up his eyeliner in case some commenter decides to zoom in.

He mixes deli cheese slices and a dash of ranch dressing into the boxed mac and cheese kept in the back of the cupboard. He bakes it all in the oven topped with bread crumbs, and then he displays the finished product for the viewers while wearing a cowboy hat he left on the counter. At some point while he’s cooking, the hamsters got into the hat, and when he puts it on they’re sitting on the brim.

The video goes viral. Phichit’s sponsor wants him again, his sister comments saying it cheered her up, and the heat of the mac and cheese, once it’s in his belly, counteracts the cold, wet weather perfectly.

He writes down the recipe on a post it note and sticks it to the wall.

It’s a start.

* * *

 

The first breath of air in Bangkok is rejuvenating.

Phichit passes advertisements with his face on them on the way home. He drives past his home rink, the one where he took his first tentative steps onto the ice, and grins hugely. At that time, Phichit was obsessed with The King and The Skater (and okay, he still is); all he wanted to do was try and fail to imitate the routines shown in that movie. He’d spend hours fumbling around the rink, trying to be Arthur Stuart, even doing a terrible British accent.

The first words Phichit learned in English were all lines of dialogue from the film.

He’s surrounded from the moment he steps foot in the airport by his family—his parents in conservative business dress, his siblings in various colors. They clamor to hear about his flight, to be introduced to poor Ciao Ciao who is planesick, to point out all the places Phichit’s face is displayed.

Phichit snaps a photo of himself and his family, captions it home, and uploads it before he lets himself be ushered out.

The heat in Bangkok on his skin is like an embrace, the sound of Thai being spoken on the streets like music. Phichit talks endlessly, thrilled by the way the words flow off his tongue without any thought at all. As they’re walking out of the airport, a little girl stops him and tells him she wants to be a figure skater, too. And then she asks for his autograph.

_Keep skating,_ Phichit scrawls for her in pen.

The jet lag hits him hard as soon as he’s inside the house. His parents take Ciao Ciao for a tour of the rink and to get settled; Phichit drags himself upstairs to his room (The King and The Skater poster and an old ISU competition schedule tacked to the wall) and collapses in bed.

When he wakes the sun is rising. The smell of home fills his nostril, some indefinable mix of the laundry of home and the city air, and he buries his face in the pillow happily before getting washed and changed.

He goes down to the kitchen and begins, again, with tom yum gooang.

The water boils while he prepares the prawns and preps the ingredients that need chopping. The lemongrass is bruised and knotted; the fish sauce is from the jar his father tends. He juices the lime; there’s something satisfying about crushing it to extract every last drop. At the end, he tips in the prawns and the nam prig pow, another ingredient his father makes himself.

He pours himself a bowl while it’s still steaming.

The first mouthful is like home, sour and spicy and imbued with every memory and every feeling of national pride.

Phichit finishes the bowl and then heads down to the rink. For his debut, this season where he’ll be training in Bangkok, he knows what he’ll be skating to. He retrieves his skate bag and his phone, humming Shall We Skate all the way, and steps out into the morning.

This is going to be his year, he knows. He’s mastered cooking, now he’s going to take gold at the Grand Prix Final.


End file.
